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The Davis high school robotics team — Citrus Circuits — reaches a milestone this year as the team prepares for a fifteenth competitive season.

The team was started in 2004 by math teacher Steve Harvey, with only a handful of students working out of Harvey’s classroom and a small storage shed on the Da Vinci Charter Academy campus. Since then, the team has grown to nearly 100 students working in a fully equipped robotics shop at Davis High School and is recognized as one the leading robotics programs in the world.

The team has repeatedly reached the finals of the FIRST Robotics world championships, even taking home the title of world champions in 2015.

But Citrus Circuits has done more than just compete over these past 15 years — the team has also spread STEM education to surrounding communities in hopes of inspiring more kids to become involved.

Citrus Circuits head coach Steve Harvey, left, helps students prepare the robot for travel to their first competition. Courtesy photo

Students staff a Davis Farmers’ Market booth where children of any age can interact with a tabletop robot, present a series of fall workshops to help other FRC teams, run a program at competitions called Citrus Service to help teams be more competitive, host the Davis Youth Robotics league and summer camps for kids in grades 4-8, and help homeless individuals in the community with their Shelter Finder app that connects people with available shelter beds.

They’re also one of the founding teams of The Compass Alliance, a worldwide organization that helps provide resources to new and inexperienced robotics teams.

Over the past 15 years, Harvey has continued to lead Citrus Circuits as head coach and has helped push the team to expand its influence beyond competition.

“Robotics is an outstanding opportunity for students to engage with all aspects of STEM, and we’ve developed a unique peer-to-peer educational model that encourages students to learn from each other,” Harvey said. “We’ve been able to use the success of this program to start a series of robotics classes at the high school and to start new classes at several elementary schools.

“As the program has grown, I continue to be encouraged by how our students have benefitted by their experience on the team and the impact we can have in the community.”

This year, the team is playing FIRST’s 2019 game, DESTINATION: DEEP SPACE, presented by Boeing.

For the first 15 seconds of each match, shutters are lowered to prevent drivers from seeing the field. During this period, each team can either choose to use an autonomous routine or manually drive the robot using a vision system. After the first 15 seconds, drivers take control of their robots. Teams load cargo (rubber playground balls) into two rockets and a cargo ship while placing hatch panels (flat disks) on both to earn points. At the end of the game, robots attempt to climb a series of raised platforms to earn extra points.

Citrus Circuits is heading to three regional competitions for the 2019 season, the first one being the Central Valley Regional this weekend in Fresno. They then return to Davis to compete in the Sacramento Regional from March 20-23 at UC Davis, and finally the Aerospace Valley Regional in Lancaster from April 3-6.

If the team wins at any one of these regional competitions, they advance to the World Championships in Houston from April 17-20.

Citrus Circuits includes students from Da Vinci, Davis High and Holmes, Emerson and Harper junior high schools. Major sponsors include the Davis Joint Unified School District, UC Davis, Technip FMC Schilling Robotics, Hill Engineering and Lockheed Martin. For information visit www.citruscircuits.org

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